A Festive Week

So, it was Harry's first Christmas - yay! She woke up around 6.30am, which we figured would be about what time we oculd expect to be awoken in future years. We helped Harriet open her presents in bed - that is, we had her sitting in our laps whilst we stopped her from eating the wrapping paper. The presents (a new Mozart Magic Cube won off ebay and some Fisher Price Roll-a-Rounds) went down pretty well, although we found out that the Cube doesn't have a volume control unfortunately. It's not overly loud or anything, just set a little above what I'd like.

We were having everyone over at our house - Grandma, James' parents, my dad and his wife, her brother and his children plus my sisters and their boyfriends. So it was supposed to be an up-and-at-'em-action- stations kind of day. However James and Mike had finished the verandah, we had run ourselves ragged on Christmas Eve getting everything organised and I had even half prepared the salads I was making for that afternoon. So while we were lying in bed we realised that there was nothing to do! Perfect! So we laid around playing with Harry, she fell back asleep, we thought we better make her feel comfortable so we fell back asleep with her and everyone had a nice sleep in. Mmmmm.....

The day went really well, everyone ate a lot, drank a bit and when the final person rolled out of the house at about 11pm we crashed into bed. Harriet actually dealt with the day a whole lot better than I thought she would. 4 days before she had had her vaccinations and since she had such a horrible response to them last time, I was dreading what would happen this time. She cracked it big time at about 7pm and didn't go down to sleep at her normal times or anything, but we figured that was to be expected, what with everyone handling her, playing with her and there being generally a million things to stimlate a little baby. Turns out the candle flames were a big hit and she spent quite a while watching those. They did look gorgeous flickering out on the verandah with the fairy lights in the mild evening.

Harriet cleaned up bounty-wise. A million clothes, teddy bears (yes that is a Harriet-sized Gromit lying next to her. Thanks Jussy, she loves it!), our presents, a little book set of Dr Seuss, books, a bracelet, a snuggle rug and one of the big hits of the day was the activity board Grandma bought her.

You can see her playing with it here - she can hit quite a few buttons that make noise and flash various lights around. She hadn't come into contact with something that made noise like that before so it was pretty exciting.